The purpose of this proposal is to acquire research skills and training experience that will be directed toward developing new knowledge about Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), specifically in the area of expectation and healing. In the course of this proposal, guided independent study and coursework at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health will culminate in a Ph.D. thesis. For the thesis, there are two overall goals: 1) To describe the techniques CAM practitioners use in patient-healer interaction; 2) To better understand the relationship of patient-provided interaction and expectation creation. Phase one of the thesis research will consist of examining patient-healer interactions conducted by acupuncturists using rigorous methods developed for analyzing patient-healer interactions conducted by conventional practitioners. Phase two of the research thesis will explore the connection of the patient-healer interaction and the creation of expectation using in-depth qualitative interviews with both acupuncture patients and practitioners. The long-term goals are to further the understanding of expectation and healing (by examining in detail both the mechanisms by which expectation works to promote healing and how expectation is created in clinical settings); and to develop interventions to help healers, both conventional and alternative, to better serve their patients by using expectation.